Abstract
In this paper, I defend my book Conversation and Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2012) in response to three critics: Julia Driver, David Shoemaker, and Manuel Vargas. Driver raises questions about my account of private blame. Shoemaker finds problems with my account of quality of will. And Vargas questions the conversational nature of my account.
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Notes
David Shoemaker’s paper was accidentally published in a prior issue of this journal rather than this issue as part of this symposium. Readers can find his article in volume 10:1 of Criminal Law and Philosophy.
See the section of Shoemaker’s paper titled “Motivation.”
See the sections of Shoemaker’s paper titled “Regard and Moral Consideration,” and “The Stance of Quality of Will.”
See the section of Shoemaker’s paper titled “The Stance of Quality of Will.”
To explain, suppose Jenny responds with outrage to the morally objectionable circumstance in which Sam has been caused to suffer by way of another’s callous disregard for him. If what outrages Jenny is the fact that there is a true way to describe Sam’s treatment as morally objectionable, then her concern is with morality de dicto—with the way the world can be described in moral terms. But if instead what outrages Jenny is Sam’s actual suffering and the way it as caused, the callousness of the way he was treated, and so on, then her concern arises from the natural conditions that are morally salient. In this case, her concern is with morality de re.
Note that I argue with some care for the distinction (Chapter 1: 22–4) quite apart for how it applies in this context.
Carl Ginet (2006), for instance, in an essay devoted to Fischer and Ravizza’s (1998) compatibilist version of a reasons-responsive theory, endorses their overall proposal but simply appends to it one further requirement: that an agent’s free acts are not determined. Perhaps Ginet was wrong to do so (as a compatibilist, I think he was), but he did not commit himself to a contradiction.
In a footnote (n. 8), Vargas cites three reasons-responsive theorists who “take it as a central burden of their theories to elaborate some specification of the involved capacities,” Fischer and Ravizza (1998), Nelkin (2011), and Vargas (2013). Readers interested in my own contribution to this enterprise in the service of a compatibilist conclusion are invited to consider McKenna (2001, 2005, 2013).
Vargas folds into this criticism a discussion of my treatment of the voluntarism/nonvoluntarism debate. Two quick points about this: first, what I wish to say in reply to Vargas regarding his main charge here (about the temporal issue) is orthogonal to the voluntarism/nonvoluntarism issue. For this reason, I will set the latter aside. Second, as I have noted earlier in replying to Shoemaker, I am not committed to nonvoluntarism about moral responsibility (see C&R: 204). I only meant to show in C&R that the conversational theory can accommodate a nonvoluntarist thesis of the sort that in other work (2008) I have developed (without endorsing).
There might be a point in blaming him as a kind of moral protest and thus a means of signaling to others one’s moral status and demands (more on this below).
There is a further possibility that I will gloss over here, one that now seems to me more credible than it did prior to David Shoemaker’s recent book, Responsibility from the Margins (2015). An agent like Finn might be morally responsible not in the accountability sense but rather only in the attributability sense. How so? Her so acting reveals something objectionable about what she stood for in being willing to harm others for trivial personal gain.
This is in opposition to something that Strawson (1962) suggests.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments, I would like to thank Ishtiyaque Haji, Paul Russell, Carolina Sartorio, David Shoemaker, Manuel Vargas, and Brandon Warmke. I would also like to thank Massimo Renzo for proposing and arranging this symposium on my book.
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McKenna, M. Quality of Will, Private Blame and Conversation: Reply to Driver, Shoemaker, and Vargas. Criminal Law, Philosophy 10, 243–263 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9389-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9389-7